The Willow Garage Robot Opens Up and Plugs In

We've mentioned Willow Garage before. They're a
robot startup company founded by one of the original Google designers.
They're developing PR2, a
robot they hope will lay the groundwork for
future, commercially produced personal robots. They've just reached
"milestone 2" in their R&D plan. PR2 has succeeded in completing a test
run through a crowded office environment that included human obstacles.
The robot was able to open and pass through eight conventional doors and
plug itself into nine different standard AC power outlets. The video
above shows a time
lapse of the test run which took nearly an hour to complete.

For Milestone 2, our tester designated ten different outlets
that the robot was required to plug into, although only nine of the
selected outlets were physically reachable. The robot was expected to
successfully detect that one of its ten goal outlets was behind a locked
door, abort that effort, and move on to its next outlet. The rest of the
doors were placed in various states of closed, partially opened, and
fully open.

In addition
to the PR2 hardware Willow
Garage is developing software called ROS (Robot Operating
System), a low-level control library for robots. Despite the name,
ROS actually lives on top of a conventional Unix-style OS such as GNU/Linux.
ROS is Open
Source software, licensed under the
BSD license (so it also meets the definition of Free Software).

That is very impressive I spent a whole christmas vacation period trying to get a Whitebox 914 to intelligently charge itself at a docking station. It didnt have an arm so It just drove into the charger. The ultimate goal though would be to dock with a wall socket.

The Willow garage software must be pretty good. If the algortihms and suiotable method can be ported to other systems then this could be a definate step forward for intellignet mobile robots.